Fiction: Mailbox

Bobby Hanson was 10 years old that summer, a small boy in a small town in the golden heart of the South. It was the 15th day of June, and he was playing alone in the side yard of his house, kicking a soccer ball through grass that he knew he should probably be mowing instead of running around in. Meanwhile, his mother sat on their back porch with a cell phone pressed to one ear and her laptop open in front of her.

For almost two years now, ever since Bobby’s father had died of a heart attack and Sherry Hanson had quit her job at the bank, she had managed what had eventually become a successful Internet business. Working from a home office was not only fun, she told Bobby; it was practical. She was always there when he arrived home from school, and during the summer she was there all day every day—even if she was mostly inside.

Bobby swerved left, cut right, and kicked the ball in a long, lopsided arc that ended between the trunks of two sweetgum trees. “Score!” he shouted, throwing up both hands. Then he stopped and looked around. No one had seen or heard him, for which he was grateful. But just before he ran to fetch the ball from his imaginary goal, Bobby’s gaze stopped on an unusual sight.

A hundred feet away, at the intersection of his front walk and the shady sidewalk that lined Allgood Street, stood the family’s mailbox, a standard black metal container with “Hanson” printed on the side and a movable red flag above the name. The odd thing was, the flag was only halfway up, slanted at a perfect 45-degree angle.

Bobby had never seen it like that before. Had his mom put out some mail for pickup and failed to raise the flag all the way? Had the mail carrier come early, picked up outgoing envelopes, and lowered it only halfway by accident? Curious, Bobby sprinted to the mailbox, pushed the flag down to its resting position, and looked inside.

The only thing in the mailbox was a folded sheet of white paper. Frowning, Bobby took it out, opened it, and read the six carefully printed words: “Trying this out. Check again tomorrow.” What in the world was that supposed to mean? Bobby Hanson, not as practical-minded as his mother but every bit as impatient, thought no more about it.

That is, until the next day, when he was again playing outside—this time with his dad’s old golf clubs and a muchused white ball—and once more glanced at the mailbox. Sure enough, the red flag was again at half-mast. What was the deal here?

When he ran across the yard to look inside, he found another sheet of paper. This time it said: “So far so good. Keep checking.”

This was too strange. He started to show the note to

his mother, but something made him hesitate. Instead, he tucked it into his shirt pocket beside the first one (his mom hadn’t noticed he was wearing yesterday’s grass-stained clothes again, which was probably just as well), pushed the flag down to its horizontal position, and continued his golf tournament.

The following morning he was again outdoors, and—after again seeing the slanted flag—started across the lawn toward the mailbox. But just then his mother marched out the front door with a handful of envelopes. Bobby watched her open the mailbox, glance inside, and then shove her envelopes in. She didn’t seem to notice the odd position of the flag. She just raised it to its upright, mail’s-ready-forpickup position and headed back to the house.

Bobby waited a minute, then went to the box and looked inside. There was the note on the bottom of the stack of stamped envelopes. Had his mother not seen it? He took the paper out and unfolded it, and it said simply, “Keep at it.”

The next day was Sunday—no mail—so Bobby checked the box on Monday morning. Again the flag was slanted at the halfway point. Wherever this crazy correspondence was coming from, it seemed to keep the same hours as the US Postal Service. Bobby pushed the flag down and took the paper out. This time it said, “By now you know this is just you and me, right?”

What? He read it again, looked all around, and thought about that for a while. Who and me? But there were no answers to be found, and no one to ask anyway, so he pocketed the note and hightailed it around the corner of the house to add some windows to the cardboard fort he was building against the back fence.

The next day, Tuesday, he got up early, wrote “Who are you?” on a slip of paper with a red-ink ballpoint pen—he loved to write with that pen—and then went to the box and placed the note inside. He started to raise the flag to 45 degrees but decided not to. But it worked anyway. An hour later he pushed aside the cardboard window of his fort, looked past the corner of the house, and saw what he’d expected: The flag was halfway up. When he jumped over the moat he’d dug around his fort (castles had moats, he figured, so why shouldn’t forts?), he dashed out to the mailbox to find that his note was indeed gone. In its place was another note, written in the usual black ink, saying (in response to the one he’d just sent, he supposed), “You’ll figure it out.”

Bobby did finally figure it out, but it took a while. For the rest of that month and into July, he and the mysterious writer swapped messages. No one ever interfered. Once, when Bobby was gone all morning to his friend Kevin’s house, the mail carrier came early and deposited about a pound of mail into the box, and Bobby’s mom carried it all into the house. But the note from Bobby’s correspondent was sitting in the mailbox when he finally got home, waiting for him with the red flag at the halfway position. Neither Mom nor the mailman had moved the note, which probably meant neither of them had even seen it. Which also meant they probably couldn’t see it. The secret writer had been correct: This was just between him and Bobby.

The flag was puzzling enough on its own. Bobby stayed in his room all one morning and watched the little red banner closely, wanting to see it move. It didn’t. But after he returned from a quick trip to the bathroom, he saw that it had moved halfway up and was waiting for him.

What was even weirder was that whoever was doing this seemed to know exactly what Bobby was doing each day, where he was going, even what he was thinking. Bobby fell into the practice of asking his pen pal carefully worded questions about things Bobby needed or wanted to know, and the Mailbox-to-Another-World consistently provided answers. Well, not answers, really—just responses. And most were a little vague. Some of the early exchanges were: “Who are you?” “A friend.” “Where are you?” “Far far away.” (Bobby wondered if it was also in a galaxy a long time ago.) “Why are you doing this?” “Because I want to.” “Will we ever meet?” “Someday.”

And, little by little, from some of the more honest and detailed personal replies, the answer drew closer, and the truth eventually popped into his head. He knew who the message sender was. It was crazy—in fact, it was impossible—but it was true.

He was talking to his father.

Bobby sat in the grass beside the mailbox, holding the latest note with trembling fingers and listening to the pounding of his heart. It had to be. He couldn’t believe it—but it had to be. No one else but Robert Hanson would know the answers to some of these questions.

As time went on, Bobby had made more and more specific inquiries, about himself and his mother and their daily lives. One of them was: “Mom works too much—how can I make her smile?” The response was: “Remind her of the time her boss’s pants fell down at the bank.” Bobby had never heard about that, but he mentioned it anyway—and she burst into laughter. Another was: “Why didn’t we keep our old blue car?” Answer: “It used too much oil.” At one point, Bobby came right out and wrote, “What is your name?” The reply: “Look on the side of your mailbox.”

At last he accepted it, insane or not. Somehow, Bobby was exchanging messages with his father, his hero, the tall man with the kind heart and great smile who had dropped dead in his T-shirt and jeans one Saturday afternoon while mowing the grass when Bobby was barely 8 years old. Now the two of them, due to some kind of mind-blowing cosmic magic, were “talking” almost every day, through handwritten notes that apparently no one else could see.

When this at last dawned on him and Bobby asked again why all this was happening (the how was something he didn’t even want to think too much about)—the answer was a simple “You’ll see.”

All the way through early August, he and his father swapped messages. “What is it like there?” Bobby asked once. “Beautiful,” the note said the next day. “I miss you,” Bobby said; “I miss you too,” his father answered. They talked about incidents in Bobby’s day, his adventures in the woods behind the lot next door, his problems with one of his playmates, the new action fi gures his mom had bought him, his progress with the dam he was trying to build in the stream that bordered the backyard.

As always, no one else seemed to notice these exchanges. Part of the magic, Bobby fi gured. On the occasions that his mother saw him printing his red-inked notes, Bobby just explained that he had a secret pen pal, and she paid it no real attention. His mom was too busy with her work these days to spend much time watching him anyway. Her online business was vitally important to them both. It was what paid the bills.

Many times, Bobby was tempted to take the notes to his mother, show them to her, tell her about this miracle, allow her to get in on the party. Why should only he feel this happiness? But he never did, for what he felt was an excellent reason: He didn’t think she’d be able to see the notes.

On one memorable day, the folded piece of paper said, “Tell her I loved her.” Bobby felt tears in his eyes then, not for the fi rst time, and he did indeed tell her that. She just smiled and hugged him tight. “I know he did, baby. I loved him back, and he loved you.” They hugged for a long time, after which he saw her wiping her eyes, and Bobby wondered again if he should share the secret with her. But even if she were able to see the evidence, she probably wouldn’t believe him. Why should she? Nobody believed otherworldly stories without proof. And she already knew he had an overactive imagination.

The messages continued.

Afew days before school started, something happened that made Bobby almost forget about his supernatural correspondence. He’d been feeling weak and feverish for some time now, and his mother fi nally took him to the doctor. After several days and several embarrassing and often painful medical tests, his mother and the doc had a long, solemn talk. Bobby overheard the words sickle cell anemia and hemoglobin SS, and though he didn’t understand what any of that meant, he understood the look on his mother’s face.

It scared him silly, and although she later tried tearfully to explain it to him, he also wanted to talk to his dad about it—but he couldn’t. Now, when he took a written note out to the mailbox, it remained undelivered, and every time he looked, the fl ag was sometimes straight up and sometimes horizontal. Never halfway.

The next weeks and months passed quickly—too quickly—and Bobby spent a large part of them not at school but in the hospital or in his own bed. He never played outside anymore. In fact, he no longer played at all.

Lying in his bedroom at the front corner of the house one day, fi ghting his most recent infection and a bout of pneumonia, he snuck a glance through the curtains at the distant mailbox. Once again, the fl ag was where it was supposed to be: lying down, like him. His conversations with his dad were over.

And pretty soon everything was over.

One summer day six months after Bobby died, his mother—functional but still desperately heartbroken— trudged out her front door to put a letter to her cousin in the mailbox. When she did, she saw something odd: The fl ag was halfway up. Puzzled, she pushed it down and looked inside the box, where she saw a folded piece of white paper.

On it was a happy-face drawing and the words “Trying this out. Check again tomorrow.”

They were printed in red ink.

John M. Floyd, a former Air Force captain and IBM systems engineer, is a prolifi c writer whose work has appeared in numerous publications, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Mississippi Noir, and the Saturday Evening Post. John and his wife, Carolyn, live in Mississippi.

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